Straight Talk From a Professor of Flimflam (but Don’t Ask His Age)

“You wouldn’t want to live in a world where you couldn’t be conned,” said Ricky Jay, the illusionist. “Because it would mean you’re living in a world where you never trusted anyone or anything.”Credit
Tina Fineberg for The New York Times

Breakfast with the grand illusionist Ricky Jay happened to come on a morning when the newspapers carried articles on some well-known figures who have given others reason to wonder if they are con artists.

Like Kim Jong-un, the young North Korean leader with the unfortunate haircut. Are his nuclear threats just a bluff? And the baseball player Alex Rodriguez. Is he telling it straight about what he did or didn’t do with performance-enhancing drugs? There were also new reports about Manti Te’o, the football player caught up in someone’s online hoax, and about the usual assortment of Wall Street types said to have played fast and loose with other people’s money.

Having spent most of his life studying and practicing the art of misdirection, Mr. Jay was a logical person to ask about duplicity, and whether it is an inherent component of the human comedy.

“You wouldn’t want to live in a world where you couldn’t be conned,” he said. When he saw eyebrows arching skyward, he continued:

“Because it would mean you’re living in a world where you never trusted anyone or anything. I’ve thought about that a lot. It’s really true. The element of the con is trust. You’re giving trust, whether you’re a fan or you’re someone in a business situation. That’s what you provide. To live without it is to be suspicious of every single thing that goes on.”

If you are familiar with Mr. Jay’s stage act — perhaps you caught his last Off Broadway appearance in New York, 11 years ago — you have almost surely marveled at his mental gymnastics and his mystical way with playing cards. Some consider him our greatest sleight-of-hand artist. He is also a prolific actor, an author, a collector of rare books and, for good measure, a historian of hustles and hoaxes going back centuries.

Mr. Jay, who divides his time between New York and Los Angeles, was here for a spell because of a newly released documentary, “Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay.” Years in the making, it began a run last week at the Film Forum, on Houston Street.

At his suggestion, we met at Nice Matin, a popular restaurant on the Upper West Side, near his apartment. The designated time was 9:30 a.m., not exactly his finest hour, he acknowledged as he settled into a booth. His eyelids were like cafe awnings, to steal a description from the theater critic Ben Brantley. “It’s an odd time for me,” Mr. Jay said. “If midnight is the gambler’s noon, what the hell time is this?”

He held up fine, ordering (though not finishing) his smoked salmon and eggs, accompanied by rye toast and orange juice. No coffee? “Never had a cup of coffee,” Mr. Jay said. “Nor has my wife, though I don’t think that was in our vows.” His interviewer went for French toast, and plenty of coffee.

Let’s talk for a moment about Mr. Jay’s clothes, all black. On entering the restaurant, he tugged at his shirt sleeves. Hmm. Was something up there? “In my dotage, I don’t think I have stuff in my sleeves,” he replied. How about in the past? “I’m not sure that I’m willing to admit to that or not,” he said with a laugh.

Mr. Jay laughed easily and often. But he also came cloaked in guardedness. He allowed that he was born in Flatbush, Brooklyn. (His name then was Richard Jay Potash.) “You mentioned Alex Rodriguez,” he said. “When I was a kid and the Dodgers left Brooklyn, that was it. I’ve never followed baseball since. I’m a guy who holds a grudge.” Yet he wouldn’t reveal a detail as basic as his age, saying only that his interviewer’s guess of 65 was “in the range.”

Mr. Jay’s jacket figured in a discussion of three-card monte, a venerable con game that has disappeared from Times Square, now home instead to sometimes-abusive men in Elmo costumes. Not all New Yorkers are convinced that this qualifies as trading up.

In the monte hustle, a dealer places three slightly curved cards face down on, say, a cardboard box. He moves them around nimbly, and takes bets on which one is the target card, typically a red queen. The game is, of course, rigged. In this fashion, many a fool and his money are soon parted.

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With mention of the swindle, Mr. Jay reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulled out three cards — slightly curved, ready for action. “Just in case, ” he said. “I feel good having them in my pocket.”

The conversation was in part a journey through time, what with Mr. Jay’s references to the 15th-century French poet François Villon, to Gilbert Walker, a 16th-century writer on the subject of dice, and to the controversial anthropologist — some would say fantasist — Carlos Castaneda, who died in 1998. But latter-day rogues were front and center. Bernard L. Madoff anyone?

Given the eternal popularity of books and films about con artists, who are often depicted as engaging spirits, might even the notorious Mr. Madoff be admired someday, if only for his sheer audacity?

“That’s an interesting thought,” Mr. Jay said. “Everybody loves a con man, until they or someone they know are conned. The thing with Madoff is that it was on such an enormous level that many more people were affected than by almost any other con that’s ever been done. There are very few people, I would think, who don’t personally know someone who was conned. And that makes a difference. There’s nothing charming about it.

“Now, does it require skill to pull off something like that? Absolutely. And keep it hidden for years and years? Sure.”

Do some victims, consciously or not, practically beg to be conned?

“The standard con man’s line is you can only con someone with larceny in their heart,” Mr. Jay replied. “I can show you 800 ways in which that’s not true, but it’s what every con man will say. Certainly it is true to some extent. I mean, you’re promising people unbelievable returns. Anybody with a brain would be suspicious. Anybody with greed as their motivator wouldn’t care.”

The conversation turned to the likes of James Frey, who fabricated much of his memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” and to specialists in the art of trompe l’oeil, French for fool the eye. Why are people outraged by one yet enchanted by the other?

“I don’t know that there’s any intention by an artist to do anything other than his art, and you take from it what you will,” Mr. Jay replied. “Whereas Frey or other people who fictionalize memoirs are asking you to believe something that’s patently untrue.”

No magic was performed at breakfast, unless you count the speed with which the check came. The bill was the interviewer’s responsibility, but Mr. Jay was prepared to help out. He had those cards in his pocket, after all.

“If you don’t have enough to pay,” he said reassuringly, “I could do some three-card monte and maybe get us out of here.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 22, 2013, on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Straight Talk From a Professor of Flimflam (but Don’t Ask His Age). Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe